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A tumultuous 1971 merger that combined all of the state’s public colleges and universities into a single entity led to the creation of the University of Wisconsin System. Drawing on decades of previously unpublished sources, Patricia A. Brady details the System’s full history from its origin to the present, illuminating complex networks among and within the campuses and an evolving relationship with the state.

The UW System serves as a powerful case study for how broad, national trends in higher education take shape on the ground. Brady illustrates the ways culture wars have played out on campuses and the pressures that have mounted as universities have shifted to a student-as-consumer approach. This is the essential, unvarnished story of the unique collection of institutions that serve Wisconsin and the world—and a convincing argument for why recognizing and reinvesting in the System is critically important for the economic and civic future of the state and its citizens.

Public research universities were previously able to provide excellent education to white families thanks to healthy government funding. However, that funding has all but dried up in recent decades as historically underrepresented students have gained greater access, and now less prestigious public universities face major economic challenges.

In Broke, Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen examine virtually all aspects of campus life to show how the new economic order in public universities, particularly at two campuses in the renowned University of California system, affects students. For most of the twentieth century, they show, less affluent families of color paid with their taxes for wealthy white students to attend universities where their own offspring were not welcome. That changed as a subset of public research universities, some quite old, opted for a “new” approach, making racially and economically marginalized youth the lifeblood of the university. These new universities, however, have been particularly hard hit by austerity. To survive, they’ve had to adapt, finding new ways to secure funding and trim costs—but ultimately it’s their students who pay the price, in decreased services and inadequate infrastructure.
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The rise of new universities is a reminder that a world-class education for all is possible. Broke shows us how far we are from that ideal and sets out a path for how we could get there.

Through their interviews with faculty and administrators (from department chairs and deans to provosts and presidents) from a sample of eight public universities in the Northeast and their own experiences in both worlds, the authors provide a unique window into the life experiences and identities of those who struggle to make universities work. The book examines the culture of academic institutions and attempts to understand why change in public higher education is so difficult to accomplish.


Many faculty believe that one of their own who becomes an administrator has gone over to "the dark side." One provost recalled going for a beer with a faculty colleague and hearing the colleague complain about the latest memo "from the administration." He had to remind his friend of many years that he was the author of the offending document. Now he was "the administration." He realized that former colleagues now appeared in his office wearing suits and ties and referring to him by his title rather than his first name.


The disciplines serve as the tribes into which individual scholars are organized; the discipline is where a faculty member finds his community and identity. Administrators, on the other hand, identify with each other in trying to get the tribes to work together. Though most administrators came from the faculty ranks, their career paths take a different shape, especially in terms of mobility to another institution. It's not surprising that the two groups talk past each other.


A chapter is devoted to chairs of departments, who occupy an interesting middle ground. To their faculty, they can come across as a nurturing parent or a petty bureaucrat. The authors recommend training for chairs and administrative internships offered by the American Council on Education and other organizations.


The men and women on the campuses of the public universities described in the book make clear the challenges that universities face in terms of budgets, legislative politics, collective bargaining, rankings, and control of academic programs. If public institutions are truly to serve a public purpose, faculty and administrators must find ways to engage each other in shared conversation and management and find ways of engaging the university with the community.

Private Sectors in Higher Education examines how the tasks of higher education have been divided between public and private institutions, and with what consequences. In doing so, the author analyzes both the comparative structures of educational systems and their social relations. Besides correcting the widespread misperception that private higher education is predominately an American phenomenon, this study should enlarge the range of experience that can be brought to bear on issues currently facing public policy and private higher education. It constitutes the first scholarly treatment of private higher education outside the United States. Case studies of private sectors in seven countries—Belgium, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Sweden—form the core of this work. This material provides a perspective for probing several underlying rationales for private higher education in the United States. And finally, the author analyzes the issue of government financial support for private higher education. This book should significantly contribute to enlarging the framework of discussion of this question by broadening the understanding of the social and political underpinnings of public/private division in higher education.

Higher education is a central institution in U.S. democracy. In the 2010s, however, many states that spent previous decades building up their higher education systems began to tear them down. Growing hostility toward higher education reflected changing social forces that remade the politics of U.S. higher education. The political Right became increasingly reliant on angry white voters as higher education became more racially diverse. The Republican party became more closely connected to extremely wealthy donors as higher education became more costly. In Wrecked, Barrett J. Taylor shows how these social changes set a collision course for the Right and higher education. These attacks fed a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, which encompassed stark divestment from higher education but was primarily characterized by an attack on the institution’s social foundation of public trust. In response to these attacks, higher education officials have offered a series of partial defenses that helped higher education to cope in the short-term but did nothing to defend the institution itself against the long-term threat of declining public trust. The failure to address underlying issues of mistrust allowed conflict to escalate to the point at which many states are now wrecking their public higher education systems. Wrecked offers a unique and compelling perspective linking higher education policymaking to broader social and political forces acting in the twenty-first century.